This year alone, gamification platforms have raised over $30 million in funding and hundreds of startups with game mechanics at their very core launch almost every week

Gamification is a polarizing and divisive topic with many proponents and vocal skeptics and cynics. But it is not bullshit. Gamification is real and its benefits are tangible. Gamification is here to stay.

Some say that gamification is a "perversion" of games, their mechanics twisted into a magical marketing pill for big, evil corporations. This overlooks all the good that gamification does, and has the potential to do more of -- while conveniently ignoring that the critics themselves work for giant corporate interests of their own.

Gamification is helping real people with real issues -- promoting fitness, reducing waste and helping improve education are only the start

But even as we acknowledge that some corporations might have nefarious interests, we must recognize that the fundamental purpose of all organizations is to create as much value as possible. This value may be measured in assets or lives saved, children made healthier or kilos of trash diverted from landfill. Regardless, there is no evidence that any of the passionate designers using gamification have ill intentions, but a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Is there truly deceit in gamification's fundamental nature, as some claim? Let's take Nike+ as an example. In Nike+, players are provided with clearly disclosed encouragement to improve their physical fitness using a gamified system. And while Nike would like for you to buy more shoes, they don't trick you into doing so by any other method than wearing them out from exercise. Conversely, advocates of persuasive games tend to bury their real message without full disclosure (see Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker or Dean for America as examples). By comparison, which application is more deceitful? The one trying to get you to vote for a candidate you might not like or one designed to help you get healthier. The question is really more subtle -- hinging on issues of truth, disclosure and self-determination rather than who designed the product and what it's advocating.

It also must be said that gamification is about much more than marketing. While the trend first took root in the marketing and advertising industries, it has spread to industries trying to solve social issues like obesity, education, good government, sustainability and the like.

In education, game mechanics are proving to be very useful tools within the classroom. Ananth Pai, a one-time business exec turned elementary school teacher, found that by adding games to his curriculum and using leaderboards and social challenges in the classroom his students improved dramatically in reading and math. In 18 weeks, his below-third-grade level class is now performing at a mid fourth-grade level in reading and math.

By implementing a gamified waste diversion program, Recyclebank has increased recycling rates and reduced landfill rates by 16 percent. Simultaneously, NYC-based NextJump has convinced 70 percent of its employees to work out regularly using gamified techniques like leaderboards and team challenges. This has resulted in improved health and reduced absenteeism and healthcare costs both for the company and its employees. These are only several of the dozens of examples that can be found across the spectrum.

Gamification is helping real people with real issues -- promoting fitness, reducing waste and helping improve education are only the start. If something has the power to do this, how can it be a perversion? And if, by an academic's definition, it truly is a perversion of video games -- so what?

Some also question the motivation of gamifiers, but I wonder how many skeptics have actually met the men and women working toward a more gamified world. In common law, two elements are required to prove a crime -- actus reus (the act) and mens rea (the intent). Though no one suggests a crime in this debate around gamification, this is a useful standard to use. The facts are that the majority of gamification implementations so far (actus) have been successful. And as I know most of the people involved in these projects (many of which will be speaking at GSummit this September) I can also tell you that the intent is positive and affirming. The argument against the motivation of designers building gamified platforms has very little basis in fact.

In his latest guest editorial on this site, Ian Bogost writes that the "-ification" of gamification denotes that the process is easy and repeatable to a fault. But what exactly is bad about a process, scalability and repeatability? No matter what the art form, there must always be both a process and creativity. One must dip the brush in paint and put it on the canvas, letting it dry. How you choose to move it, what colors to use, and what the subject matter may be is up to you, but both process and creativity are required. This in no way diminishes the art form.

Similarly, no one person, group or philosophy owns the definition of a video game, nor does one perspective get to say how the mechanics behind games can or cannot be used. Gamification is an industry in infancy, one that can and will create jobs and livelihoods for many people.

This year alone, gamification platforms have raised over $30 million; hundreds of startups launch every week with game mechanics at their core, and thousands of marketers, strategists -- and, yes, even game designers -- descend on events like Gamification Summit to create an industry. By 2015, Gartner Group forecasts that 70 percent of the Global 2000 will use a gamified app, spending over $1.6 billion in the U.S. alone (according to M2 Research) to make that happen. This, we believe, will eventually lead to over 10,000 jobs created, including many for budding game designers that want to both find jobs in a tough (and shrinking) market and to make life better.

There are real and tangible benefits to gamification that cannot be denied. To write them off simply as perversions or tools of evil, scary corporations and marketers is more than denying your fellow gamer or designer the chance to make an honest living. It denies the world a chance at being a better place.

Most Popular

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.